Stay in the Game

Almost after a fortnight I was back on the tennis court. All my joints were cracking and muscles had just lost their elasticity. But no issues, I had been familiar with this body condition of my mine so many times earlier, that it really didn’t mattered.
I reached my tennis club pretty late in the morning so couldn’t meet my usual doubles partners for a good 3 setter game like we usually play.
But caught hold of one kid who has played in few under-16 state level tournaments and is on circuit for past many years. She is one of the better kids at the club and hence I thought its going to be a good practice to hit few shots with her.
After an hour of practice, I felt my body moving more rhythmically and shots were falling where I wanted to.
Finally we thought of playing a 2-3 setter match, depending upon how much our body can support, since the weather was quite hot, but thankfully not very humid.
The girl’s temperament totally changed when I named our practice session as a MATCH.
She started hitting really hard, playing serve and volley game and made me run all over the court. I was hitting too many unforced errors, every time I tried to hit a winner shot on her service or even during the volleys. I started trying harder but no luck. I was down 2-0 in the first set, as she won her serve and broke mine too. I was feeling a bit dejected, but thought I don’t have anything to loose so lets try to just hit the volleys, make her play more shots and try to hang around as much as I can.
I was not trying to put too much power in my shots, since i planned to play longer rallies, by placing the ball all over the ocourt with low height volleys, long lob shots, drop shots, slicing on the backhand. Somehow the tactic paid off. She started loosing her patience since I was not hitting very hard but just returning her shots most of the time. Finally I won my first point of the day.
In the next game. She started hitting harder than before, which lead to committing more and more errors. Finally I won the first set 6-4. Trust me; it was a quite brave attempt on my part!. She had gone pretty exhausted and so was I, the weather had taken a little toll on our bodies, but we decided to play a decider set.. We started our next set and I applied the same tactics. By the time i was leading the set 3-0, she had really lost her patience, shouting at her own self, every time she missed a shot, and once even threw her racket on the ground when she hit 2 double faults back to back. I finally ended the set 6-3 and won the match 6-4, 6-3.
Well it was not such a big occasion to write it down on my blog, to win a match against a kid, half of my age :-). But keeping in mind that, the kid is playing tennis for past 4 years, have been participating in state-level tournaments quite often and aspiring to play in grand slams oneday and I have been playing for less than 4 months only as a part of my fitness routine, I think it was quite a commendable job.
then why did I shared this small, stupid and funny incident? Not to get any applauds or appreciation from you guys, but the thought which struck to me later sitting at home while recalling the morning the game. The corporate life, business, competition, and strategy for survival!

Let me represent myself as one of those old organisations, which have been running successfully for many years in the market. With various ups n downs, booking profits as well as losses at times, but still successfully managing to run and fight against all odds and market conditions.
Suddenly a new competitor arrives (the kid), with lot of fire power, enthusiasm, new techniques, strategies, technologies, and starts giving me big competition in the market place. My established roots get a little shaken. The company is not performing as it should. So we also try to adopt the same strategies, work for longer hours, stretch my manpower for higher targets, and pushing every thing and everyone in the organisation to reach the next level.
Then the management realises, that, by putting more investment, pushing employees to work extra hours, giving stiffer targets to sales team, there strategies have brought just a marked difference compared to what they were doing earlier. The cost-benefit analysis shows that the extra efforts put in have not yielded any desired results. In this scenario the management can adopt a new technique, which i experienced today in my game. To simply follow the competition, give to the market what the competition is also giving, adopt similar kind of communication strategies and overall, just stay at a nagging distance to the competition that it can see you from the corner. In a marketing jargon, I can say behave like a ‘follower brand’ (me the old brand) to a challenger brand (kid the new competition).
In this kind of scenario, there is a high possibility that the challenger brand will explore harder, for new strategies, new products, may be new distribution and logistics mechanism, reduce costs etc, to displace me; but my management has decided to simply hang around and put in enough efforts to maintain the current market position.

Generally the tendency of these extremely passionate, ambitious and determined guys, who have been winning all the time, is there vulnerability to loss. They get extremely scared of loosing the battle, they always want to stay number one. And when they see a competition consistently follow them for quite sometime, they are likely to commit mistakes, as they keep trying harder and harder and likely to go overboard at times, in gaining that EXTRA mileage over the competition.

So that’s how, a small tennis game with a kid, taught me a business strategy which might be helpful to evade competition and survive in the market.

“Sometimes it’s advisable to just try and stay in the game and let the competition try harder. In doing so, you are making the competition more vulnerable to commit mistakes, and eventually you can be winner!”